Life and times of planet Earth
THE VAST TIMESCALE on which the universe operates tests the limits of our comprehension, and as a result we tend to overestimate the significance of our existence and role.
This is a book about the planet's history five billion years before we arrived and the powerful processes that continue to shape it today.
The author, Ron Redfern, is a renowned geologist whose previous books and TV documentaries have earned him the American Institute of Professional Geologists' Outstanding Achievement Award.
Redfern's stated aim with Origins is to package the latest scientific understanding of our planet to appeal to non-specialists.
He rises to this gargantuan task with a large, stylish book that manages to be a great read. It is difficult to categorise, it can be read on several levels. At first glance it is a glossy coffee-table tome featuring glorious spreads of panoramic landscape photographs shot by the author.
Closer inspection reveals that the pictures are arranged with short essays explaining the geological features they portray.
The essays are in turn embedded in a textbook, each section written in conjunction with experts in fields such as palaeontology, botany and archaeology. The result is a beautifully illustrated and thoroughly absorbing work which can be casually browsed or read from cover to cover - a great Christmas present for the scientist in your life, amateur or professional.
Origins paints a picture of a world ceaselessly evolving in ways invisible to us. Transient continents drift to and fro on tectonic plates of fluid rock. Oceans constantly form and disappear; ice sheets kilometres deep envelop hemispheres and then melt in the blink of a cosmic eye. (Amid all the hype about global warming, it is easy to forget the Earth is currently in the middle of a 15-million-year-old Ice Age.) We are increasingly realising that as much as life evolves to fit its environment, it completely transforms it too: the oxygen we breathe today, for example, was not a feature that our planet began with, but was produced entirely by plants after its birth.
This book reminds us how important it is to see ourselves as part of a complex, dynamic system we help shape, and just how beautiful it is.
Origins: The Evolution Of Continents, Oceans And Life
by Ron Redfern
Weidenfeld & Nicolson $275
